Tact is the most important verbal operant (Skinner, 1957) due to the uniqueness of stimulus control and its role in facilitating acquisition of another verbal (e.g., mands, intraverbals) and nonverbal (i.e., listener) operants (Sundberg, 2015). Teaching tacts to children with ASD and the research on this area, however, are largely focused on…

We examined emergent tact control following stimulus pairing, using 2 different stimulus presentation arrangements. In the word-first condition, presentation of the auditory stimulus preceded the visual stimulus, and in the image-first condition, the visual stimulus preceded the auditory stimulus. Eight children (2-5 years old) participated. In…

Two visual world experiments investigated the activation of semantically related concepts during the processing of environmental sounds and spoken words. Participants heard environmental sounds such as barking or spoken words such as "puppy" while viewing visual arrays with objects such as a bone (semantically related competitor) and…

The role of awareness in differential delay eyeblink conditioning (EBC) has been a topic of much debate. We tested the idea that awareness is required for differential delay EBC when two cues are perceptually similar. The present study manipulated frequencies of auditory conditioned stimuli (CS) to vary CS similarity in three groups of…

The project "Making voice and Presence a Virtual Realistic Experience" is funded by "HessenHub - Network digital university teaching Hessen". At the Center for Foreign Language and Occupational Competencies (German: ZfbK) at the University of Giessen, a teaching concept for student teacher training was developed that includes…

The process of spoken word recognition is influenced by both bottom-up sensory information and top-down cognitive information. These cues are used to process the phonological and semantic representations of speech. Several studies have used EEG/ERPs to study the neural mechanisms of children's spoken word recognition, but less is known about the…

This paper, co-authored between three adults and five children aged 8-11, adopts a 'collaborative writing as inquiry' approach to examine and discuss the authors' experiences of a participatory research project through the lens of critical dialectical pluralism. In the original project, children formed two 'young advisory panels', one online,…

Purpose: Verbal working memory is poorer for children with hearing loss than for peers with normal hearing (NH), even with cochlear implantation and early intervention. Poor verbal working memory can affect academic performance, especially in higher grades, making this deficit a significant problem. This study examined the stability of verbal…

Purpose: During videofluoroscopic examination of swallowing, patients commonly are instructed to hold a bolus in their mouth until they hear a verbal instruction to swallow, which usually consists of the word "swallow" and is commonly referred to as the command swallow condition. The language-induced motor facilitation theory suggests…

Dividing attention (DA) between a memory task and a secondary task results in deficits in memory performance across a wide array of memory tasks, but these effects are larger when DA occurs at encoding than at retrieval. Although some research suggests the effects of DA are equal for item and associative memory, thereby suggesting that DA disrupts…

Reading involves mapping combinations of a learned visual code (letters) onto meaning. Previous studies have shown that when visual word recognition is challenged by visual degradation, one way to mitigate these negative effects is to provide "top-down" contextual support through a written congruent sentence context. Crowding is a…

Pitch discrimination, or the ability to differentiate stimuli using auditory frequency, may be an important correlate of language acquisition. Research consistently finds that children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have differences in auditory discrimination abilities. However, studies linking these abilities to delays or impairments in…

Background: The perceptual similarity between two objects, specifically similarity in the shape of the referents, is a crucial element for relating words in earlier stages of development. The role of this perceptual similarity has not been systematically explored in children with Down syndrome (DS). Method: The aim was to explore the role of…

Visual-verbal serial recall is disrupted when task-irrelevant background speech has to be ignored. Contrary to previous suggestion, it has recently been shown that the magnitude of disruption may be accentuated by the semantic properties of the irrelevant speech. Sentences ending with unexpected words that did not match the preceding semantic…

Purpose: In the context of music and speech perception, this study aimed to assess the effect of variation in one of two auditory attributes--pitch contour and timbre--on the perception of the other in prelingually deafened young cochlear implant (CI) users, and the relationship between pitch contour perception and two cognitive functions of…